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With reference to the letters calling for a reduction in the number of design courses. Here’s my list of suggestions to add to the debate:

Let’s not go back to middle class elitist ‘centres of excellence’, and maintain an access for all policy. Why shouldn’t everyone have a chance?

Let’s have a few more commercial concerns willing to support design courses either through placement or making time to visit.

Let’s not write off any educational establishment and impose a perceived ‘second division’. Most of the ‘new’ universities were the polytechnics that are so lovingly referred to in past letters.

Let’s not make the assumption that only the ‘old guard’ polytechnic graduates have any passion for design, visit any degree show in the UK to realise this.

And let’s not rubbish young designers before they have had a chance.

Working in a ‘new’ university that spends a great deal of time talking to local business and continual monitoring and adjusting the syllabus to keep it relevant, I find these swipes tiresome and distracting from the main job of giving people the opportunity to develop skills useful to industry as whole.

Can I just point out that the views expressed here are my own and are not necessarily the University of Central Lancashire’s.